Beginners guide to programming – part 1

This series is meant to gradually introduce programming to the total beginners. And I mean like really total, like my father or mother which are actually using their computer without having the smallest clue how it works. As a matter of fact if the operating system freeze they may be able to restart the computer and that’s where their troubleshooting knowledge ends. Don’t get me wrong, restarting operating system helped me numerous times and it’s always one of the first choices I made in the path of troubleshooting.

However, if your plan is to become developer/ programmer you need to expand your knowledge of computer inner workings and I can assure you it’s more interesting than you might think. And it’s easy, at least to the level you need. Let’s begin …

You already know your computer (PC, Mac, laptop, tablet, smartphone..) needs electricity to work so you can think of electricity as information carrier inside of your computer. If there’s no electricity, there’s no information flow between computer components.

And you can count some computer components, at least those you use every day, like screen, keyboard, and mouse. You probably heard for hard disk, CPU, and RAM as well, which are the core of almost any computer system. There are also some arbitrary components like graphic, sound, network (LAN, wifi, Bluetooth, GSM).

On smaller devices like smartphones, many of these components are put (integrated) together on one board (for size reasons) which is known as the motherboard. On some motherboards, you can change some components like CPU and RAM (like on your PC) and on smaller ones, like smartphones, you can’t change anything. But we won’t go into much details regarding different components and why and how to change them.

It's important to remember that beyond powering your computer, electricity is used as information carrier between different computer components.

So now you are completed level 1. You know more about computer systems than 99% of the population.